When multiple reviewers collaborate on classifying media items, such as documents or other data files, different reviewers may classify identical media items differently. For example, where attorneys review documents in advance of a document production during discovery/disclosure, a first attorney in a first jurisdiction may mark a document as privileged, confidential, or otherwise sensitive, while a second attorney in a second jurisdiction may mark the same document for disclosure. Further, once documents are classified as privileged, confidential or otherwise sensitive, there may be a need to control or monitor access or distribution of those documents, imposed by a court protective order restricting access to documents produced as part of the discovery/disclosure process. The inadvertent or unauthorized distribution of a document originally considered privileged or confidential, whether intentionally or accidentally, could have disastrous effects.
As legal/regulatory proceedings become more complex and discovery/disclosure processes include more and more documents, the risk of inadvertent or unauthorized disclosure of confidential documents, or otherwise providing inconsistent disclosures, is exacerbated. Such inconsistent disclosures can lead to loss of reputation, court sanctions, malpractice proceedings, unhappy clients, and professional misconduct proceedings, among other problems.
These problems may arise because clients do not always instruct the same set of lawyers to represent them in complex proceedings (which are often multi-jurisdictional), or because different firms represent clients in different actions in which an overlapping set of documents are involved. Similarly, a single firm may assign different legal teams and different lawyers to review documents for different matters, or different parts of a single matter. Any time different attorneys or different legal teams review the same discovery materials, there is likely to be at least some degree of inconsistency in decisions involving privileged, confidential or otherwise sensitive documents.
Further, in some cases, sensitive materials may appear in the form of a cross-reference to a document containing sensitive materials. In such a scenario, the document containing the cross reference may require classification as confidential or sensitive, or may instead require redaction prior to disclosure.
There is a need, therefore, for a platform that can alert users to actual or potential inadvertent or unauthorized disclosure of confidential documents in the corporate, governmental, and legal arenas. Such distribution of sensitive documents may be deliberate or inadvertent arising out of dishonest or negligent acts or inconsistent classifications across multiple classification processes.
In addition to legal/regulatory proceedings, other contexts in which such unauthorized or inadvertent disclosures of confidential materials must be prevented exist as well. In contexts other than litigation (for example the activities of commercial and government entities), such unauthorized or inadvertent disclosures could result in the releasing of trade secrets (in the case of commercial entities), state secrets (in the case of government entities) or otherwise confidential documents. Accordingly, in a corporate or government environment in which confidential documents are created, accessed and transmitted, there is a need for a platform that can provide alerts when a document that may be confidential or otherwise sensitive, is removed (or about to be removed) from the specified environment. There may be a further need for such a platform that can generate alerts for a variety of suspicious activities related to such confidential documents, such as the copying (in whole or in part) of such documents to thumb drives, downloading/uploading to file sharing sites or the emailing or other transmission of such documents and in such circumstances quarantine the relevant sensitive media item or document.